[RNLD] data recovery options

[Daryn McKenny]

Hi Reuben,

This is who I would recommend as a data recovery centre: http://www.payam.com.au

When it comes to hardware the external drive that I use now is from Buffalo http://www.buffalotech.com/products/portable-hard-drives/ministation/ministation-extreme It is a US Military spec. shock resistant unit amongst other things, of course not to say that it is bullet proof (I am not expecting you to have to deal with bullets anyway), but never less is far better than the home designed go-flex WD and similar seagate products which are not that crash hot bumping them around.

I have only ever used data recovery software in a windows environment and that was a while ago so can't really comment on that part.

Good Luck.

Regards

Daryn

Arwarbukarl Cultural Resource Association Inc. Trading as:
Miromaa Aboriginal Language and Technology Centre

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From: Reuben Brown <reubenbrown85 at gmail.com<mailto:reubenbrown85 at gmail.com>>
To: "r-n-l-d at lists.unimelb.edu.au<mailto:r-n-l-d at lists.unimelb.edu.au>" <r-n-l-d at lists.unimelb.edu.au<mailto:r-n-l-d at lists.unimelb.edu.au>>
Subject: [RNLD] data recovery options

Dear RNLD subscribers,

You've probably heard this story before, but here comes another cautionary tale about the virtues of constant data back up while in the field, and the pitfalls of external drives which can fail at any moment it seems, no matter how big or expensive or new they are.

I have potentially lost about 2 months of PhD fieldwork recordings that I had not got around to backing up, stored on an external USB hard drive which has failed or become corrupted (Seagate GoFlex Free Agent, less than 6 months old). I took the drive to the local computer shop in Darwin and they tried to recover the data using some of their software programs but were unsuccessful. Now I am looking at sending the drive to data recovery specialists in Sydney or Melbourne and I wondered if anyone has any recommendations as to whom I might sent it to?

Also, has anyone tried recovering data on their own before using programs like TestDisk<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk> or PhotoRec<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoRec>? An earlier thread<http://www.rnld.org/recovering_files> suggested a program called 'Back2Life' but it doesn't appear to support EXFAT formatted drives. I am looking at recovering MTS, wav, mp3, mp4, and mov files which were all stored on the drive. I am using a Mac OSX 10.6.8, which I originally used to format the drive to EXFAT so that it could be used for both Mac and PC. One day it was working and the next day I plugged it in on the same machine to find that 'the disk you inserted was not readable by this computer'. I have tried different USB cables and different machines, but no luck reading the partition.

Any considerations or suggestions much appreciated.

Regards,

Reuben.
--
Reuben Brown

PhD Candidate
The University of Sydney
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